ERIC BAERREN: Bill Schuette's AG campaign just plain vile

When the state's term limit law was written, the kind of person its authors had in mind was Bill Schuette. Their intention was to open elected office to new blood with new ideas and to cycle "career politicians" off the public teat.

Schuette defines the term "career politician." If you look at the trajectory of his public service, he has jumped from job to job to job with no coherent path. He has been a state lawmaker, a congressman, an official in John Engler's Department of Agriculture and finally -- despite having no relevant experience -- an appellate judge (his election to this office makes a strong case to appoint these judges rather than elect them). Now, he wants to be the attorney general.

If you go by the depths to which his campaign has plumbed, it appears that he really, really wants the job. In fact, if there were an award for the vilest, most awful campaign every election season, we wouldn't need to wait for Nov. 3. Schuette could walk away with it right now.

You knew at the outset of this race that the Republican nominee, no matter who it was, would attempt to paint the Democrat as "soft on crime." It makes no difference that the attorney general's office has little direct role in prosecuting criminal cases. The Republican would promise to crush criminals while saying that the Democrat would serve them tea and cookies while patting them on the heads and telling them to behave.

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I don't doubt that this fable is intentional. In this political environment, campaigns to large extent bank on voters being poorly informed. Lying to reporters isn't just commonplace, it's considered a crucial element of strategy. Inventing job duties is simple extension of that. (This phenomenon knows no political party, incidentally. I spent all summer being lied to.)

Republicans are trying to frame the Democratic candidate, David Leyton, as soft on crime. If elected, he will allow criminals to roam the streets, murdering and plundering. To the contrary, Schuette is a Republican. What you're supposed to not remember is that there isn't anything on Schuette's resume to suggest that he's a tough guy (aside from heading up the campaign opposing medical marijuana two years ago.) The closest he's come to prosecuting criminals is watching reruns of "Law and Order."

The effort to tar Leyton as soft on crime is predicated on the fact that Leyton has not brought every murder suspect in Genesee County to trial. He has allowed some of them to plea to lesser crimes in exchange for lesser sentences.

Trials are incredibly expensive things, and any prosecuting attorney who brings every major crime to trial would in short order exhaust his department's budget, and the citizenry would become outraged that he was going through taxpayer dollars like it grew on trees. Allowing criminal suspects to take plea deals not only saves time and money, but it also creates some justice in cases that the prosecutor could well lose at trial.

Here is where things turn vile. To support this charge, the Schuette campaign has been parading around family members of crime victims who say that David Leyton denied them justice, and set up a website to provide them with a place to tell their story. They've also put them in television ads.

The depth of how shamelessly exploitative this is was revealed earlier this week, when one of the parents left a string of comments on a news site. She said, distilled down, that the Jew lawyer Leyton had deprived her of justice, and the Jew who runs the site had connived to keep the suspect's ethnicity out of the paper.

Grieving parents will do and say lots of things that otherwise might be inexcusable. The father of a friend of mine who was killed in an automobile accident when I was 18 drank himself to death. Looking back, it would have been a preferable outcome if he'd simply degenerated into bigotry.

There is a way to deal with this kind of grief. You allow the person to rant while reminding yourself that this person is dealing with tremendous personal tragedy. You don't judge, you offer them moral support and hope to hell you're never in their shoes. This is essentially how the nation reacted to Cindy Sheehan a few years ago (well, that's how normal people reacted; conservative bloggers and political operatives attempted to assassinate her character).

There is a way not to deal with this kind of grief, which is to exploit it to win a political campaign. To the extent that exposure to a wide audience through television commercials enabled her comments, Schuette owns the bigotry unleashed earlier this week. He helped create the monster, He owns part of what it unleashed. If elected, the state's attorney general will have gotten there by engaging in conduct worthy of nothing but deep scorn.